Would anyone tell me if I was getting...stupider?

[davywavy]

Reading the newspaper the other day, I came across a piece which said that University admissions tutors were decrying the decline in educational standards represented by A-level grades. For example, one claim they were making was that work of a standard which would have recieved an "F" (fail) grade 15 years ago was now routinely being awarded a "C" grade, and that this was making the task of identifying good quality students capable of benefitting from university education increasingly difficult - especially in the light of central government initiatives to do away with separate University entrance exams - and that all exam grades were being marked up in a similar fashion.
Some people might be shocked by this decline in educational standards, but as usual I see it as an opportunity. I'm going to be asking the exam board for my 15-year old A-level grades to be reclassified in line with this dumbing down process. This will transform my educational achievements from the lacklustre selection of middling grades that they currently are to four A* grades, which should in turn help me get into a decent university rather than the Mickey Mouse establishment I actually attended.
And I'll deserve it just as much as anyone.

Comments

[lareinemisere.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced the comparison of the average from one sector with the highest from the other is a terribly revealing one. And while what you refer to as vocational jobs with 'real' risk of (presumably physical)illness and injury are a factor, I think it's worth my saying again that the reason for the disparity is that by far the biggest cause of sick leave in the public sector is stress. I have a copy of Public Sector Review that I received today with an article based on that point, and suggesting that public sector employers need to get much better at supporting people when they come back from stress-related sick leave, else they don't come back at all or go sick again. Sadly, it's one of the 50% or so of the articles that isn't available on their website for me to link to it.

Again, a suggested possible reasons behind the specific statistics you mention: Birmingham is the largest council in the country (I used to work there... but those stats don't include me, as I quit in 2002 and moved to London). I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that a management desire for 'efficiency' leads to people in all manner of council jobs in Birmingham having responsibility for larger geographical areas/a bigger caseload etc than those with similar jobs elsewhere.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Well, according to the secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions, the number of days' sick leave taken by local government employees in England for the year April 2000 until March 2001 was approximately 15.9 million—an average of 9.6 days per employee (This compared with 10.5 days across the public sector as a whole). Birmingham was use as an illustrative case in point as having the highest of all. (I now can't find the 2003 figures I had earlier - the great thing about google is that it can find everything. The bad thing is that it does find everything). During the same period, the average worker (public and private) took a little over 7 days sick per annum, which indicates that lower sickleave in the private sector brings the average down substantially.
This begs the question; is working in the public sector less healthy, or is the public sector laxer on sick leave than the private. I suppose that the way to find out is to look at relative incidence of sick leave in eqiuvalent jobs such as BUPA/NHS medical staff (or perhaps better, Medicins sans frontiers/NHS sick leave), public/private landlords, and state/private schools.

[lareinemisere.livejournal.com]

>' ...is working in the public sector less healthy, or is the public sector laxer on sick leave than the private?'.

In the absence of any cast-iron conclusive evidence for one vs the other, I suspect we could agree on 'Probably both'.

I dare say you'd find similar stresses in many of those similar jobs, though. I don't think the source of the money is the source of the difference: it's the nature of the jobs. It's just that the majority of those unusually stressful jobs are in the public, or the not-for-profit, sectors.

I certainly wouldn't want to teach in [one particular] private school again, any more than I'd go back to teach in a state school - there were too many unreconstructed chauvinist piglets, and too many kids who thought that because their parents had money they somehow owned you and had a right to high grades for no real work, because they'd 'paid for them'.